During a lifetime, the decision
often has to be made again and again as the road ends, or diverges.“Our battered suitcases were
piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go,” Beat Novelist Jack
Kerouac wrote. “But no matter, the road is life.”

Want to talk about laying your own yellow brick road? Fifty years ago this month, IBM did just that. It charted its own new path and thereby changed the worlds of computing and business with
the revolutionary
System/360, an entirely new
dimension in computing that ushered in the Information Age.

System/360
came about because of an extremely risky decision by a small group of IBM managers
and engineers. They could have chosen to continue to refine already successful products -- and there were sound technical and marketing arguments for doing that.

But
after debates that were described as “fierce,” they decided to essentially bet the
business on what would be the largest privately financed commercial project
ever.

Launching the System/360 eventually cost the company upwards of $5 billion (many times that number in current dollars).

IBM
Chief Tom Watson, Jr.: ”the riskiest decision I ever made.”

In
choosing to map out their ambitious and difficult yellow brick road, IBM’s
resolve delivered an important moment in history and put the company in
position to dominate its industry for decades.

For us as
individuals, too, the yellow brick road we choose to either follow or fashion delivers a moment in history – our own, and one that's no less important.It took a
poet of the brilliance of Robert Frost to measure the significance of that moment: